Salman Rushdie Books In Order

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun’s father is the greatest of all storytellers. His magical stories bring laughter to the sad city of Alifbay. But one day something goes wrong and his father runs out of stories to tell. Haroun is determined to return the storyteller’s gift to his father. So he flies off on the back of the Hoopie bird to the Sea of Stories and a fantastic adventure begins.

Luka and the Fire of Life

Like all children about to set off on an adventure, Luka Khalifa is a special kid. For one thing, his father is the famed storyteller Rashid Khalifa, the Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions. For another, Luka’s older brother, Haroun, had already had an adventure of his own, travelling to a previously unknown moon and overthrowing a terrible enemy who threatened the Sea of Stories. Finally, and most importantly, Luka s mother announced on the day of his birth that her newborn son had the power to turn back time; after all, he had been born well after his parents youth. Plus, he was left handed. So it is only a matter of time before Luka finds himself in the midst of a great adventure. It begins, however, with something Luka gives very little thought to. When the Great Rings of Fire circus comes to the city of Kahani, Luka stops to watch the animals and performers troop through the streets. When he sees that the gentle beasts are treated cruelly by the brutish leader of the circus, the hard hearted Captain Aag, he does what any other kid would do: he curses the circus master. The difference between Luka and other kids, however, is that Luka s curse comes to pass. An evil fate befalls the circus, and the next morning, outside Luka s door are waiting a circus bear named Dog and a circus dog named Bear. They have come to be Luka s companions. But curses are not things to be thrown about lightly, and Luka s first experiments with magic soon come back to haunt him, as a mysterious illness takes hold of his beloved father. Just when it seems that Rashid Khalifa will fade away altogether, Luka is visited by a flock of hideous vultures bearing a message from Captain Aag, threatening vengeance for the boy s curse. The next morning, he looks out into the street and sees an apparition that looks exactly like his father. As he dashes out into the street to try to make sense of this double, he stumbles, and when he regains his balance he realizes he has somehow stepped into the World of Magic. And so begins his adventure. In the company of Bear, the dog, and Dog, the bear, and led by this troubling version of his father, whom he calls Nobodaddy, Luka must do what his mother said he was born to. To save his father, he must work his way upstream, against the current of the River of Time, and do what has never been done: he must steal the Fire of Life. The episodes of his quest are hair raising and often hilarious. Luka and his companions must make their way past the many dangers of the River of Time as they head upstream. Some, like the Old Man of the River, are there to guard against intruders. Others, like the rats of the Respectorate of I, are merely ill tempered. And the most perilous dangers aren t enemies at all, but the simple fact that it s difficult to go upstream, and if you do you ll have to pass the Swamp of the Mists of Time and the Whirlpool of El Tiempo, to say nothing of the Rings of Fire. But the World of Magic is not all hostile, and as he works his way towards his goal, Luka makes many friends, receives help from strangers and even falls in love. By the end of his adventure, the whole World of Magic has been stirred up like a hornets nest by the young intruder. Still, the best adventures aren t about swashbuckling or narrow escapes; they re about learning something about the world and about yourself. As Luka is drawn deeper and deeper into this strange world populated by nearly forgotten gods and figures from exotic myth, it is not the World of Magic that comes into focus for him, but his relationship with his beloved father back home in bed, the storyteller who conjured this whole world out of nothing by the sheer force of his imagination. In the end, Luka s adventure is quite literally a race against time. But to succeed, the young boy must not only make his way to the Fire of Life to return, he must convince the angry gods of the truths he has learned on his quest. Only when he has changed the World of Magic can he return to his own world and his father s bedside. Weaving together bits of mythology, fairy tales, children s puns, metaphysics and echoes from well known tales as different as The Matrix and The Wizard of Oz, Luka and the Fire of Life becomes a story about things as intimate as a boy s love for his family, and as sprawling as the meaning of life itself. From the Hardcover edition.

The Wizard of Oz

frontis., 19 color and 16 b&w photos ‘The Wizard of Oz was my very first literary influence,’ writes Salman Rushdie in his account of the great MGM children’s classic. At the age of ten he had written a story, ‘Over the Rainbow,’ about a colorful fantasy world. But for Rushdie The Wizard of Oz is more than a children’s film, and more than a fantasy. It’s a story whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, where the weakness of grown ups forces children to take control of their own destinies. Rushdie rejects the conventional view that its fantasy of escape from reality ends with a comforting return to home, sweet home. On the contrary, it is a film that speaks to the exile. The Wizard of Oz shows that imagination can become reality, that there is no such place like home, or rather that the only home is the one we make for ourselves. Rushdie’s brilliant insights into a film more often seen than written about are rounded off with a typically scintillating new short story, ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,’ about the day when Dorothy’s red shoes are knocked down to $15,000 at a sale of MGM props.

Double Indemnity (By:Richard Schickel)

frontis., 23 b&w photos A new kind of film emerged from Hollywood in the early 1940s, thrillers that derived their plots from the hard boiled school of crime fiction but with a style all their own. Appearing in 1944, Double Indemnity was a key film in the definition of the genre that came to be known as film noir. Its script creates two unforgettable criminal characters: the cynically manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson Barbara Stanwyck and the likeable but amoral Walter Neff Fred MacMurray. Billy Wilder’s brilliant direction enmeshes them in chiaroscuro patterns, the bright California sun throwing shadows of venetian blinds across dusty rooms, shafts of harsh lamplight cutting through the night. Richard Schickel traces in fascinating detail the genesis of the film: its literary origins in the crime fiction of the 1930s, the difficult relations between Wilder and his scriptwriter Raymond Chandler, the casting of a reluctant Fred MacMurray, the late decision to cut from the film the expensively shot final sequence of Neff’s execution. This elegantly written account, copiously illustrated, confirms a new the status of Double Indemnity as an undisputed classic.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (By:A.L. Kennedy)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, released in 1943, is regarded as one of the masterpieces of British cinema. In this interpretation of the film, A.L. Kennedy finds it to be a complex and richly ambiguous dissection of what it means to be English, and what it is to be ‘at home’.

L’avventura (By:Geoffrey Nowell-Smith)

Illustrated Michelangelo Antonioni’s starkly beautiful L’avventura is one of the great masterpieces of European art cinema, though at Cannes in 1960 it baffled and enraged its first audience. The plot is simple: a woman disappears while visiting a tiny, remote island with friends and it’s as if they don’t notice that she’s gone. What has happened to her? L’avventura disclaims the conventions of narrative cinema in the most radical way: it never provides an answer to this question. Antonioni has often been labelled pessimist but, as Geoffrey Nowell Smith argues, his work is not judgemental and is better described as sceptical, concerned with truth rather than consolation. L’avventura seems indifferent to either progress or decadence, Nowell Smith writes: its characters are placed fairly and squarely where they are, with no past to return to or future to advance to. Stripped of consoling certainties, existentially alone, they are observed with a meticulousness that takes nothing for granted. As well as detailing the circumstances of production, Nowell Smith relates L’avventura to other groundbreaking films of the period and to all of Antonioni’s earlier and later work. In order to appreciate the significance of L’avventura, he concludes, it is necessary to understand not only that the film is a classic but also that it was a revolution in cinema.

WR (By:Raymond Durgnat)

The starting point for Dusan Makavejev’s film ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ is Wilhelm Reich, the Marxist psychoanalyst who preached sexual enlightenment as a gateway to a better society. Juxtaposing hippie America and cold war Yugoslavia, it’s a film which speaks urgently to the contemporary world. In the BFI MODERN CLASSICS series.

A Matter of Life and Death (By:)

Illustrated A dazzling fantasy produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, A Matter of Life and Death 1946 is one of the greatest achievements of co directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death the film is a haunting meditation on love, grief and the legacy of war, made vivid by remarkable colour photography and set design including the famous ‘stairway to heaven’. Ian Christie, one of the foremost scholars of Powell and Pressburger looks in detail at the making of the film as well as locating it in the broadest traditions of British art.

The Night of the Hunter (By:Simon Callow)

This is an examination of ‘The Night of the Hunter’, Charles Laughton’s only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

César (By:)

Bringing to a close his ‘Marseille’ trilogy, Cesar was one of Marcel Pagnol’s most significant projects. This text reviews the questions that Pagnol posed in the film, looking at how he reflected the contemporary and artistic culture of the city, around which the trilogy was based.

The Best Years of Our Lives (By:Sarah Kozloff)

Due to its popularity and the controversy it engendered, The Best Years of Our Lives stands as one of the most important cultural documents of the post WWII era. Moreover, with its emphasis on soldiers returning from war with post traumatic stress syndrome, facing an uncertain economic climate, and strained domestic lives, the film speaks with emotional power directly to contemporary issues, including the devastating injuries and insecurites faced by soldiers returning home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq today. Among the topics discussed are American neorealism, aesthetics, war and homecoming, and more.

Grimus

A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present day…
Thunderous and touching. Financial TimesAfter drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing and ultimately the burden of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island’s peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face to face with the island s creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago. A book to be read twice…
Grimus is literate, it is fun, it is meaningful, and perhaps most important, it pushes the boundaries of the form outward. Los Angeles Times

Midnight’s Children

The original stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight s Children, winner of the 1993 Booker of Bookers, the best book to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty five years.

In the moments of upheaval that surround the stroke of midnight on August 14 15, 1947, the day India proclaimed its independence from Great Britain, 1,001 children are born each of whom is gifted with supernatural powers. Midnight s Children focuses on the fates of two of them the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the male heir of a wealthy Muslim family who become inextricably linked when a midwife switches the boys at birth.

An allegory of modern India, Midnight s Children is a family saga set against the volatile events of the thirty years following the country s independence the partitioning of India and Pakistan, the rule of Indira Gandhi, the onset of violence and war, and the imposition of martial law. It is a magical and haunting tale, of fragmentation and of the struggle for identity and belonging that links personal life with national history.

In collaboration with Simon Reade, Tim Supple and the Royal Shakespeare Society, Salman Rushdie has adapted his masterpiece for the stage.

Shame

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is not quite Pakistan. In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation Shamelessness, Shame: the roots of violence. Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.

The Satanic Verses

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

The Moor’s Last Sigh

The grandeur of the achievement is this: with The Moor’s Last Sigh, his first novel in seven years, Salman Rushdie gives us a masterpiece of controlled storytelling. Surpassing even the spectacular, imaginative brilliance of Midnight’s Children, informed by astonishing scope and ambition, by turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny, The Moor’s Last Sigh is galvanizing.’Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high born crossbreed: me, Moraes Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’ for most of my life, the only male heir to the spice trade ‘n’ big business millions of the da Gama Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment by my mother, Aurora, nee da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists.’The Moor evokes his family’s often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. His is a tale of premature deaths and family rifts, of thwarted loves and mad passions, of secrecy and greed, of power and money, and of the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art. East, West, by Salman Rushdie, is also available from Random House AudioBooks. Art Malik has extensive acting credits both here and in his native England. He is well known for playing the role of Hari Kumar in The Jewel and the Crown. His film credits include True Lies, No Place to Hide, and A Passage to India.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by ormus’s childhood friend and Vina’s sometime lover, the photographer Rai. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. This is Salman Rushdie’s boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, and account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus.

Fury

‘Life is fury. Fury sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb.’ Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America’s wealth and power, seeking to ‘erase’ himself. Eat me, America, he prays, and give me peace. But fury is all around him. Cabdrivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green eyed young blonde in a D’Angelo Voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world. Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York. Not since the Bombay of Midnight’s Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. In his eighth novel, Salman Rushdie brilliantly entwines moments of anger and frenzy with those of humor, honesty, and intimacy. Fury is, above all, a masterly chronicle of the human condition.

Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers, a dazzling novel that brings together the fiercest passions of the heart and the gravest conflicts of our time into an astonishingly powerful, all encompassing story.

Max Ophuls memorable life ends violently in Los Angeles in 1993 when he is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown. At first the crime seems to be politically motivated Ophuls was previously ambassador to India, and later US counterterrorism chief but it is much more.

Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious and willing Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their village’s traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmir s increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance.

With sweeping brilliance, Salman Rushdie portrays fanatical mullahs as fully as documentary filmmakers, rural headmen as completely as British spies; he describes villages that compete to make the most splendid feasts, the mentality behind martial law, and the celebrity of Los Angeles policemen, all with the same genius.

But the main story is only part of the story. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. Shalimar the Clown is a true work of the era of globalization, intricately mingling lives and countries, and finding unexpected and sometimes tragic connections between the seemingly disparate. The violent fate of Kashmir recalls Strasbourg s experience in World War Two; Resistance heroism against the Na*zis counterpoints Al Qaeda s terror in Pakistan, North Africa and the Philippines. 1960s Pachigam is not so far from post war London, or the Hollywood driven present day Los Angeles where Max s daughter by Boonyi, India Ophuls, beautiful, strong willed, modern, waits, as vengeance plays itself out.

A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of people s lives, desires and crises India Ophuls desperate search for her real mother, for example; Max s wife s attempts to deal with his philandering as well as, in typical Rushdie fashion, a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.

Shalimar the Clown is steeped in both the Hindu epic Ramayana and the great European novelists, melding the storytelling traditions of east and west into a magnificently fruitful blend and serves, itself, as a corrective to the destructive clashes of values it scorchingly depicts. Enthralling, comic and amazingly abundant, it will no doubt come to be seen as one of the key books of our time.

The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador s drivers tended to be short term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in po*rnography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day s appointments, trying not to let the card shake. He knew Shalimar s real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast s body and a tragedian s face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle poque mansion near the now destroyed old synagogue, and found himself marvelling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley…
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from Shalimar the Clown

The Enchantress of Florence

A tall, yellow haired young European traveller calling himself Mogor dell Amore, the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara K z, Lady Black Eyes , a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia s boyhood friend il Machia Niccol Machiavelli is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he s a liar, must he die?From the Hardcover edition.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The original stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight s Children, winner of the 1993 Booker of Bookers, the best book to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty five years.

In the moments of upheaval that surround the stroke of midnight on August 14 15, 1947, the day India proclaimed its independence from Great Britain, 1,001 children are born each of whom is gifted with supernatural powers. Midnight s Children focuses on the fates of two of them the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the male heir of a wealthy Muslim family who become inextricably linked when a midwife switches the boys at birth.

An allegory of modern India, Midnight s Children is a family saga set against the volatile events of the thirty years following the country s independence the partitioning of India and Pakistan, the rule of Indira Gandhi, the onset of violence and war, and the imposition of martial law. It is a magical and haunting tale, of fragmentation and of the struggle for identity and belonging that links personal life with national history.

In collaboration with Simon Reade, Tim Supple and the Royal Shakespeare Society, Salman Rushdie has adapted his masterpiece for the stage.

East, West

His first major adult work of fiction since The Satanic Verses his very first collection of stories. In several narratives of extraordinary range and power, one of the most outstanding writers in the world today reveals the intricate intimacies and unbridgeable distances between the East and the West.A rickshaw driver dreams of being a Bombay movie star while, in a futuristic Western dystopia, legendary Hollywood icons acquire magical powers. Indian diplomats, who as childhood friends hatched ‘Star Trek’ fantasies, must boldly go into a hidden universe of conspiracy and violence. In Rushdie’s hybrid world, Christopher Columbus is an immigrant, dreaming of Western glory. An elderly Indian lady in London must choose between love and home. With profound sensitivity, Rushdie allows himself, like his characters, to be pulled now in one direction, now in another. Yet throughout this collection he remains, really, an author who insists on our cultural complexity; who confidently rises beyond ideology, refusing to choose between East and West. East, West is available in hardcover from Pantheon Books.

The Jaguar Smile

In this brilliantly focussed and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister a priest to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room. His perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and his unique flair for language, in ‘The Jaguar Smile‘, Rushdie brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, everything is contested, and life or death struggles are an everyday occurrence.

Imaginary Homelands

Rushdie at his most candid, impassioned, and incisive an important and moving record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. These 75 essays demonstrate Rushdie’s range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

Conversations with Salman Rushdie

‘If there’s an attempt to silence a writer, the best thing a writer can do is not be silenced. If somebody is trying to stifle your voice, you should try and make sure it speaks louder than before.’ Acclaim, success, and controversy follow every one of Salman Rushdie’s writings. His novels and stories have won him awards and made him both famous in the literary world and a catalyst for protests worldwide. For nearly a decade after publication of The Satanic Verses, he faced a bounty on his life. Although Rushdie has participated in a great number of interviews, many of his most revealing conversations were published in journals and newspapers throughout the globe not only in England and the United States, but also in India, Canada, and across Europe. Conversations with Salman Rushdie, the first collection of interviews with Rushdie, brings together the best and some of the rarest of the interviews the author has granted. Though many know Rushdie for his novels, what most do not realize is the breadth of Rushdie’s writing and thinking. There are many other Salman Rushdies the travel writer, the crafter of short stories, the filmmaker, the ‘children’s’ story writer, the essayist and critic, and the unflinching commentator on contemporary culture, particularly on race and inequality. ‘The speaking of suppressed truths is one of the great possibilities of the novel,’ he tells the Third World Book Review, ‘and it is perhaps the main reason why the novel becomes the most dangerous of art forms in all countries where people, governments, are trying to distort the truth.’ Rushdie talks extensively about the creative process, about his views on art and politics, and about his life before and after the fatwa. Articulate, witty, and learned, he shows the side of himself that sparks such controversy. While not necessarily seeking to provoke, Rushdie shows how controversy is often inseparable from the politically charged situations and issues that compel him to write. Rushdie takes risks in his writing, pushing both the novelistic form and language to its limits. ‘Dispense with safety nets,’ he says in Imaginary Homelands. These interviews reveal a man with a powerful mind, a wry sense of humor, and an unshakable commitment to justice. Michael R. Reder is director of the Roth Writing Center and an instructor in the department of English at Connecticut College.

Step Across This Line

To cross a frontier is to be transformed…
. The frontier is a wake up call. At the frontier, we can t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier s windowless halls, we see things as they are. In Salman Rushdie s latest collection of nonfiction, he crosses over the frontier and sees and tells things as they are, inviting readers to Step Across This Line with him. The essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in Step Across This Line, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The collection chronicles Rushdie s intellectual odyssey and is also an especially personal look into the writer s psyche. With the same fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and very strong opinions that distinguish his fiction, Rushdie writes about his fascination with The Wizard of Oz, his obsession with soccer, and the state of the novel, among many other topics. Most notably, delving into his unique personal experience fighting the Iranian fatwa, he addresses the subject of militant Islam in a series of challenging and deeply felt responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book ends with the eponymous Step Across This Line, a lecture Rushdie delivered at Yale in the spring of 2002, which has never been published before and is sure to prompt discussion. Rushdie s first collection of nonfiction, Imaginary Homelands, offered a unique vision of politics, literature, and culture for the 1980s. Step Across This Line does the same and more for the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first.

The Best American Short Stories 1981

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Louis D. Rubin, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Tallent, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1983

Short Stories by Ann Tyler, Bill Barich, John Updike, Carolyn Chute, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the Amer ican short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such c lassic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest,’ Raymond Carve r’s ‘Cathedral,’ and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents. Hardcover edition also available. Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Short Stories 1993

The preeminent annual collection of short fiction features the writing of John Updike, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry, Diane Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dixon, and Mary Gaitskill.

The Best American Short Stories 1994

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1995

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1996

Each fall, The Best American Short Stories provides a fresh showcase for this rich and unpredictable genre. Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, the choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and an array of stunning new talent.

The Best American Short Stories 1997

The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx’s selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Junot D’az, and T. C. Boyle as well as an array of stunning new talent. In her introduction, Proulx writes that beyond their strength and vigor, these stories achieve ‘a certain intangible feel for the depth of human experience, not uncommonly expressed through a kind of dry humor.’ As ever, this year’s volume surprises and rewards.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

Edited by beloved storyteller Garrison Keillor, this year’s volume promises to be full of humor, surprises, and, as always, accomplished writing by new and familiar voices. The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling author.

The Best American Short Stories 1999

‘What I look for most in a story,’ writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, ‘what I crave, what I found in these twenty one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell.’ Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,’ by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy’s haunting story ‘The Uncharted Heart,’ a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. ‘Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before,’ writes Tan. ‘I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself.’ With twenty one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories 2000

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor always a preeminent master of the form THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, ‘Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller…
who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character’s and the writer’s own.’ Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content When a great annual collection comes out, it’s hard to know the reason why. Was there a bumper crop of high quality stories, or was this year’s guest editor especially gifted at winnowing out the good ones? Either way, the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories is a standout in a series that can be uneven. Its editor, E.L. Doctorow, seems to have a fondness for the ‘what if?’ story, the kind of tale that posits an imagination prodding question and then attempts to answer it. Nathan Englander’s ‘The Gilgul of Park Avenue’ asks: What if a WASPy financial analyst, riding in a cab one day, discovers to his surprise that he is irrevocably Jewish? In ‘The Ordinary Son,’ Ron Carlson asks: What if you are the only average person in a family of certifiable geniuses? And Allan Gurganus’s ‘He’s at the Office’ asks: What if the quintessential postwar American working man were forced to retire? This last story is narrated by the man’s grown son, who at the story’s opening takes his dad for a walk. Though it’s the present day, the father is still dressed in his full 1950s businessman regalia, including camel hair overcoat and felt hat. The two walk by a teenager. ‘The boy smiled. ‘Way bad look on you, guy.”

My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was ‘I think he likes you.’

The exchange typifies the writing showcased in this anthology: in these stories, again and again, we find a breakdown of human communication that is sprightly, humorous, and devastatingly complete. A few more of the terrific stories featured herein: Amy Bloom’s ‘The Story,’ a goofy metafiction about a villainous divorcee; Geoffrey Becker’s ‘Black Elvis,’ which tells of, well, a black Elvis; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ a story of an Indian man who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the collection itself, Lahiri’s story amas*ses a lovely, funny mood as it goes along. Claire Dederer

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Since the series’ inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best fifty five extraordinary stories that represent a century’s worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike’s contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959, to his most recent, in 1998. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

The Best American Short Stories 2002

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

This year’s Best American Short Stories features a rich mix of voices, from both intriguing new writers and established masters of the form like Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arthur Miller. The 2002 collection includes stories about everything from illicit love affairs to family, the immigrant experience and badly behaved children stories varied in subject but unified in their power and humanity. In the words of this year’s guest editor, the best selling author Sue Miller, ‘The American short story today is healthy and strong…
These stories arrived in the nick of time…
to teach me once more what we read fiction for.’

The Best American Short Stories 2003

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 2004

Story for story, readers can’t beat The Best American Short Stories series…
Each year it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story’ Chicago Tribune. This year’s most beloved short fiction anthology is edited by the best selling novelist Sue Miller, author of While I Was Gone, and, most recently, The World Below. The volume includes stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jill McCorkle, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, and Akhil Sharma, among others. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content In her opening remarks to The Best American Short Stories 2002, guest editor Sue Miller notes the difficulty of reading fiction produced during 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She also remarks that by the time she had finalized her 20 selections, this act of reading had restored her faith both in fiction’s significance and its ability to tap into timeless themes. The 2002 anthology includes stories best described as realist fiction or traditional fiction, many set in contemporary times. The tales range from E.L. Doctorow’s ‘A House on the Plains,’ a murder set at the turn of the century, to pieces with more recent settings, like ‘Puppy’ by Richard Ford, which shows how a New Orleans couple deals or doesn’t deal with the appearance of a stray dog. Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Nobody’s Business’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Seven’ deftly portray the disconnection a semi assimilated Indian American and Haitian American couple experience both as partners and as U.S. citizens. Leonard Michael’s ‘Nachman from Los Angeles,’ in contrast, adds some levity to the mix. Miller adds in her preface that maybe next year the tales will depart further from tradition, but judging from this volume no departure is necessary: the selections take the reader on a delightful journey through some of America’s best contemporary writers. Jane Hodges

The Best American Short Stories 2005

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane Tom Perrotta Alice Munro Edward P. Jones Joy Williams Joyce Carol Oates Thomas McGuane Kelly Link Charles D’Ambrosio Cory Doctorow George Saunders and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

The Best American Short Stories 2006

While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about, writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.

This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In The View from Castle Rock, the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander s cast of young characters in How We Avenged the Blums confronts a bully dubbed The Anti Semite to both comic and tragic ends. In Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart wrenching look at a young man s choices when his father along with most of the men in his small town is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li s After a Life reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in Tatooizm, Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple s relationship that has run its course.

Ann Patchett brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness to The Best American Short Stories 2006 , writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, and she is, surely, every story writer s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

In his introduction to this volume, Stephen King writes, Talent does more than come out; it bursts out, again and again, doing exuberant cartwheels while the band plays ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’…
Talent can t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. In fact, that’s its job. Wonderfully eclectic, The Best American Short Stories 2007 collects stories by writers of undeniable talent, both newcomers and favorites. These stories examine the turning points in life when we, as children or parents, lovers or friends or colleagues, must break certain rules in order to remain true to ourselves. In T. C. Boyle s heartbreaking Balto, a thirteen year old girl provides devastating courtroom testimony in her father s trial. Aryn Kyle s charming story Allegiance shows a young girl caught between her despairing British mother and motherly American father. In The Bris, Eileen Pollack brilliantly writes of a son struggling to fulfill his filial obligations, even when they require a breach of morality and religion. Kate Walbert s stunning Do Something portrays one mother s impassioned and revolutionary refusal to accept her son s death. And in Richard Russo s graceful Horseman, an English professor comes to understand that plagiarism reveals more about a student than original work can. New series editor Heidi Pitlor writes, Stephen King s dedication, unflagging hard work, and enthusiasm for excellent writing shone through on nearly a daily basis this past year…
We agreed, disagreed, and in the end very much concurred on the merit of the twenty stories chosen. The result is a vibrant assortment of stories and voices brim*ming with attitude, deep wisdom, and rare compassion.

The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 1890 1941 was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains 1917 and The Forgotten Threshold 1918.

The Best American Short Stories 2008

This brilliant collection, edited by the award winning and perennially provocative Salman Rushdie, boasts a magnificent array Library Journal of voices both new and recognized. With Rushdie at the helm, the 2008 edition reflects the variety of substance and style and the consistent quality that readers have come to expect Publishers Weekly. We all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are. The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself. Salman Rushdie, editorThe Best American Short Stories 2008 includes KEVIN BROCKMEIER ALLEGRA GOODMAN A. M. HOMES NICOLE KRAUSS JONATHAN LETHEM STEVEN MILLHAUSER DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ALICE MUNRO GEORGE SAUNDERS TOBIAS WOLFF and others

The Best American Short Stories 2009

Edited by critically acclaimed, best selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year’s collection serve as a provacative literary ‘antenna for what is going on in the world’ Chicago Tribune. The collection boasts great variety from ‘famous to first timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds’ St. Louis Post Dispatch, ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best selling Best American.

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by the award winning, best selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative Wall Street Journal. With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America s oldest and best selling story anthology is sure to be of enduring quality Chicago Tribune this year.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

With a New AfterwordAs a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

Mirrorwork

This unique anthology presents thirty two selections by Indian authors writing in English over the past half century. Selected by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, these novel excerpts, stories, and memoirs illuminate wonderful writing by authors often overlooked in the West. Chronologically arranged to reveal the development of Indian literature in English, this volume includes works by Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sahgal, Saadat Hasan Manto, G.V. Desani, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, Salman Rushdie, Padma Perera, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Sara Suleri, Firdaus Kanga, Anjana Appachana, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Mukul Kesavan, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.